Explosion in Danvers MA
Early this morning, around 2:45 AM, my wife and I were woken up by a thunderous boom that shook the house. We both jumped out of bed, looked out the window, but all was quiet. I thought maybe the explosion was downstairs in the basement so I went down to check it out. My wife turned on the TV and tuned in to local Boston news channels but there was nothing about an explosion. No breaking news. Nothing. Finally I went outside to see if I could tell what happened. Still not luck.
We were up for almost an hour worried that something bad had happened. It was hard to go back to sleep. For us, being from New York City, it was strange how quiet the streets were. It seems the explosion did not wake any of our neighbors. And there was nothing on the local news. As a matter of fact the local news was nothing more than a re-broadcast of an early news broadcast. Boy, we miss NY1 at times like this.
Well, the mystery of what happened was uncovered this morning when I checked Boston.com. Seems there was a major chemical explosion in near by Danvers.
We live a few miles from Danvers and we felt the affects of the explosion, so it must have been one heck of an explosion. As I said it woke up from our sleep and shook the house. And we live a few miles away. It’s amazing no one was seriously hurt.
3 Years and Going Strong
White Peak Software is 3 years ago today. What an amazing ride it has been over the last 3 years. It’s almost hard to believe 3 years has past.
CodeGear
It’s official. Borland’s Developer Tool Group, aka DTG, aka DevCo, has spun off. The new company is called CodeGear.
Here are various links about CodeGear and today’s announcement:<ul>
<li>CodeGear blog posting by Allen Bauer, CodeGear Chief Scientist
</li><li>Letter from Ben Smith, CEO CodeGear
</li><li>Borland Spins Off Its Tools Unit
</li><li>Borland Launches CodeGear to Supply Developers with Tools of the Trade
</li><li>Borland forms CodeGear - FAQ
</li></ul>
Naked man arrested for concealed weapon
Boston.com is reporting a naked man arrested for concealed weapon. So how can a naked man conceal a “6-inch metal awl wrapped in black electrical tape” you ask? You’ll have the read the article. Ouch…
Surge in Email Spam
I don’t know about you but the number of spam mails I receive daily has definitely gone up in recent months. And I’m not just imagining it either. There has been a surge in spam.
Update: More on the surge in spam.
Delphi 2006 Survey
Yesterday Nick Hodges announced that the Delphi 2006 Survey is online. Share your feedback by filling out this year’s survey.
Namespaces in Delphi
Recently there have been some good postings about using namespaces in Delphi such as the ones here, here, and here. I like how namespaces are implemented in Delphi but I have been slow to adopt them in my Delphi code (especially Win32 code). The problem I have is that the BDS Project Manager has no collapsible view, or grouping for namespaces. Instead, Project Manager lists the unit names. My namespaces tend to be wordy which means I cannot easily see the unit name without making the Project Manager window very wide.
It will be great if the next release of BDS provides some sort of grouping of namespaces within the Project Manager. For example, each segment in the namespace could be represented as a folder that can expand and collapse. And the contents of the folder would be the final unit name or additional namespaces contained within. In other words, the Project Manager would look something like this when the following units are included:
Units:
WhitePeakSoftware.Data.DataProvider.pas
WhitePeakSoftware.Data.Providers.SqlProvider.pas
WhitePeakSoftware.Data.Providers.SqliteProvider.pas
WhitePeakSoftware.Net.MailClient.pas
Project Manager:
<pre>
ProjectGroup
- MyProgram.exe
+ References
- WhitePeakSoftware
- Data
- Providers
- SqlProvider.pas
- SqliteProvider.pas
- DataProvider.pas
- Net
- MailClient.pas
</pre>
There is already a feature request in the QC that asks for namespace grouping. Please vote for this feature if you are using namespaces in Delphi and you would like to see some type of namespace grouping.
Parse CSV or Tab Separated Files Using Delphi
The wpsCsvParser has been updated to support parsing Tab Separated Value files. You can specify the value separator type by setting the new ValueSeparatorType property to either vsCsv or vsTab. Or you can set the ValueSeparator property to any character you wish to use as the separator. The default is vsCsv for CSV parsing.
White & Nerdy
Weird Al’s new video White Nerdy is too funny. He even makes a reference to my favorite programming language Pascal saying “At Pascal, I am number one”.
